CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The debate about urban compactness is not new. Quite the contrary, the issue of "concentration-dispersion" is in the very origin of modern urban planning. According to Peter Hall (2002, p. 49), "the clock of planning history started ticking", "almost exactly in 1900", as a reaction to the horrors of congestion that were seen in the slums of Victorian cities. Hall is, of course, making a reference to the publication of Ebenezer Howard´s classic (1898; 1902) "Garden Cities of To-morrow", as well as the beginning of the Garden City Movement. As a matter of fact, the movement´s first initiative was limit densities and disperse cities over the country side. Two decades later, Le Corbusier proposed something close to the absolute opposite: increase density to unprecedented values, but only at certain points, so that there would be more available green areas; a city of towers in parks. In both cases, the working ideas were based on the same diagnosis that had been considered valid since the accelerated urbanization of industrial cities took place in the 19th century, and they both pursued the same objective, which was the "search to recover that double harmony that had been lost in modern metropolis, towards the inside with the community ... and towards the outside with nature" (Gorelik 2008, p. 82). Utterly convinced of urban planning´s capacity for achieving this, the point of the debate was to create a new and improved modern society, starting with the transformation or ex novo creation of a new and improved city. British Garden Cities, Soviet de-urbanists proposals, Le Corbusier´s Ville Radiuese, Wright´s Broadacre City, Soria y Mata´s linear city for Madrid and that of Leonidov´s for Magnitogorsk, just to name a few, are noteworthy examples of both currents.